"Grey Over Blue"

Werkdiscs / Ninja Tune

Artists:

Producer Darren Cunningham spent 2013 making his music slower, muddier and less personable, shedding whatever inclinations had toward techno for the kind of creaky, unvarnished ambience I associate with those zombie video games my brother is always insisting I’d like. “Grey Over Blue”, the A-side from a twelve-inch released last month, is a loop with barely any development, less a track and more a meditation on a few lonesome, brokedown sounds. (Fittingly, the single—and Cunningham’s forthcoming album Ghettoville—are being released on Ninja Tune, a UK label that spent the mid-'90s putting out the kind of spectral, downtempo hip-hop it could easily be traced back to.) Cunningham is by his own admission an enthusiastic weed smoker—not much of a surprise—but here he moves toward music that doesn't only appeal to the stoned, but that mimics a stoned state: foggy, repetitive and locked hypnotically inside itself.